Free The Holiday Killer by Holly Hunt

you both. I'll bring her car around when we're done here. Make sure you do something about her hand."
    Phil nodded, pulling Liz close and turning her back to the cruiser that had driven him. "I will. Just…" His voice broke and he swallowed hard, looking to his father, who had come to stand beside him. "Just keep him as safe as you can, okay?"
    Lisa nodded as Phil helped Liz to the passenger door. "Stick her in a bath, Phil. Help her forget what she saw."
    Bill clapped his hand on Phil's shoulder, squeezing, and Phil nodded. "Thank you, Lisa."
    Lisa nodded, tight-lipped, and gestured for the uniforms in the front seat to start the car.
    "I'll come with you. There's nothing I can do here, and I've seen enough parents go to pieces recently to guess at how to help you both," Bill said quietly, his other hand on Liz's shoulder. "Liz, we'll get through this—"
    "'Get through this'?" she demanded, turning on her father-in-law. "Get over it? That's my son hanging from fishing line! Your goddamn grandson is dead because I couldn't find the bastard in time! This is my fault!"
    "No, Liz," Phil said as Bill lifted his hands in defense, stepping back from the steel in her voice. "This is not your fault."
    She climbed into the cruiser, slamming the door, and leaned forward, her head in her hands, her body shaking with sobs.
    She felt the car dip as Phil and Bill climbed in the cruiser with her, but didn't look up from her hands. The car took off, the somber atmosphere of the crime scene pervading the air of the cruiser, none of them knowing what to say.
     

9
     
     
     
     
     
    The bath did Liz no good. She sat and cried, and when Lisa came to make the official announcement that Jamie's body had been found, she simply sat on the couch, staring at the corner of the room. Phil and Lisa both cast worried looks at her, but they didn't intervene.
    From then on, nightmares haunted Liz's dreams to the point where she had no choice but to get out of bed and sit on the couch, awake, but thinking. She could think only of Jamie, strung up over the sewer, an ode to the efforts of a madman who attacked young children.
    She'd started drawing—a hobby she hadn't picked up since she left college—but it was her only outlet for the things she'd seen.
    But all she drew was Jamie, hung over the sewer, in graphic detail. Every miniscule bruise was filled in, every drop of blood, to the point where looking at the images took some of the pain away, opened her detective mind to what was going on. It distracted her from the events and made her focus on the case, duplicates of every victim's file contained in her memory and her sketchpad.
    Phil made the mistake of asking what she was drawing once. When she showed him the detail on Jamie's skinned ribs, he'd gone to throw up and never requested to see them again. A police-funded psychiatrist came to visit a couple of days later, and she refused to look at the pictures directly, instead simply asking Liz about them.
    Planning the funeral had been horrible. She hadn't been able to focus on the arrangements, leaving Lisa and Bill to make most of the decisions. Phil added his own input, preferring that Jamie be buried on a Friday, but Liz didn't care one day to another. She took to pacing in front of his bedroom door whenever they asked about funeral arrangements, never quite able to bring herself to open it. She spent the time arguing with herself over whether or not she needed to see the spotless room, or whether to return to the kitchen and face reality.
    Eventually, she always returned to the kitchen, leaving the room closed off.
    She was going to find the Holiday Killer, and exact vengeance for Jamie's death.
    Fuck you, she thought, pacing in front of the door again while Phil and Rose argued over the color of the flowers in the kitchen. I'm coming for you. Your days are numbered, so count them again. Watch your back, fucker.
    *
    The day of his funeral, she stopped in front of Jaime's door, wearing her best